The website for professional hospice and palliative care chaplains in the UK

Research

ERICH

ERICH, the European Research Institute for Chaplaincy in Healthcare, works closely with the European Network of Healthcare Chaplains, which the AHPCC is part of. It promotes Spiritual Care research throughout Europe. You can download the latest ERICH Newsletter here.

Current Research

At present, several UK hospices are contributing to research into the Specialist Spiritual Care Performance-Related Outcome Measure (PROM) Project, which seeks to provide a validated tool capable of demonstrating the effectiveness of chaplaincy interventions. This is a major international research project that several of our members are involved with, and Austyn Snowden, one of the lead researchers will be bringing us up to date with its progress at our annual conference.
ERICH is involved with this, as are several health authorities. You can access more in-depth PROM Information here.

The worldwide pandemic has influenced the way spiritual care has been delivered in health care. Some even say that spiritual care will never be the same after we have been forced to find other ways to connect with people, to do rituals, to support staff, and so on.
With your help, we would like to get better insight into how the pandemic influenceds spiritual care. A better understanding of this will help us better advocate for chaplaincy and spiritual care during future pandemics or other crises. It will also help us keep new practices that may have been beneficial in the ‘new normal’.
This survey was put together by teams in Europe, USA and Australia, led by the European Research Institute for Chaplains in Health Care (ERICH www.chaplaincyresearch.eu). Thanks also to our colleagues from professional associations and research organizations around the world who have been happy to promote and disseminate this survey as widely as possible. It is open for chaplains of all continents.We have the approval of the university ethics committee of KU Leuven, Belgium to conduct this research. The survey doesn’t ask for any personal data, and your anonymity is guaranteed. You should know that the data from the surveys will be held securely, but that it will also be analysed by the teams in Europe, USA, Australia. This is so we can maximise our understanding of what we sincerely hope will be a very large dataset.
Please take some time to fill in the survey which you can find at: https://survey.napier.ac.uk/n/ERICHg.aspx. It will take 20-30 minutes. If you wish, you can answer the open questions in your own language.

Finally, we would like to thank you for all you did and are doing for patients, their loved ones and staff. With respect and gratitude,
Professor Anne Vandenhoeck, KU Leuven, Belgium director of ERICH
Professor Austyn Snowden, Napier University, Scotland, senior researcher ERICH
Joost Verhoef, chaplain OLVG Amsterdam, Netherlands, coordinator ERICH